Shannon Ravenel Books

This novel of a boyhood in 1940s Virginia offers “a graceful, compassionate ode to farm life in a bygone era” ( Publishers Weekly ). Charlie Lewis is the only child of metropolitan parents who, after World War II, decide to move to the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains and live on a “gentleman’s farm” near Charlottesville. Just six years old when his family settles in to their new life, Charlie discovers his personal version of heaven. Charlie has a natural—almost supernatural—affinity for the land and its animals. His encounters with an ancient, half-blind mule, a boar hog and his harem, a mother fox, and four domestic dogs gone wild educate and intrigue him—and lead him to contemplate the mysteries of their Maker. Wanting to learn all he can, he instinctively turns to a group of older black men, some of whom work the farm, others who are neighbors. Jim Crow laws are still very much evident, but Charlie’s passions endear him to these men, who understand that he is lonely even if he does not. They watch out for him, and more—they love him. Capturing the innocence and wonder of childhood , Winter Run is “a very sweet, almost mystical tale of a boy who was amazed by what nature brought him, his growing up, and his understanding that all things, even life as he knows it, are passing” ( Booklist ).

When Stella Suberman wrote her first memoir, The Jew Store, at the age of seventy-six, she was widely praised for shedding light on a forgotten piece of American history--Jewish life in the rural South. In her new memoir, Suberman reveals yet another overlooked aspect of America's past--the domestic side of war. Her story begins in the Miami Beach she grew up in, when hotel signs boasted "Always a View, Never a Jew" and where a passenger ship lingered just off shore carrying hundreds of European Jews hoping for--but never finding--sanctuary. It was a time of innocence, before that war in Europe became our war. Stella was nineteen when America entered the fighting. By the time she was twenty-three, the war was over. She married Jack Suberman the week he enlisted and set out alone to join him in California. She was kicked off trains to make room for soldiers, her luggage was stolen, she was arrested for soliciting, but she was determined to follow her husband. And she did so for the next four years as he was sent from air base to air base, first training to be a bombardier and then training others. It wasn't until he was sent overseas to fly combat missions that she finally went back home to wait, as did so many other soldier's wives. This remarkable memoir renders a double understanding of war--of how it matured a young woman and how it matured a country. By personalizing the patriotism of the 1940s, Stella Suberman's story becomes the story of all military wives and serves as a powerful reminder of how differently many Americans feel about war sixty years later.

Even as a child, Suzanne Berne understood the source of her father’s terrible melancholy: he’d lost his mother when he was a little boy. Decades later, with her father now elderly and ailing, she decides to try to uncover the woman who continues to haunt him. Every family has a missing person, someone who died young or disappeared, leaving a legacy of loss. Aided by vintage photographs and a box of old keepsakes, Berne sets out to fill in her grandmother’s silhouette and along the way uncovers her own foothold in American history. Lucile Berne, née Kroger, was a daughter of Bernard Henry Kroger, the archetypal American self-made man, who at twenty-three established what is today’s $76 billion grocery enterprise. From her turn-of-the-century Cincinnati childhood to her college years at Wellesley, her tenure as treasurer of her father’s huge company, her stint as a relief worker in devastated France, her marriage to a professional singer, and the elusive, unhappy wealthy young matron she became, Lucile both illustrates and contradicts her times. In the process of creating this portrait, Berne discovers the function of family history: “to explain what is essentially inexplicable—how we came to be ourselves.”